The words “college-entrance exam” send shivers down the spines of many American high-school students. Most collegebound students see them as necessary hurdles to enrolling in a four-year college, but for some, the process of registering, preparing for, and taking an ACT or SAT is the ultimate obstacle to realizing their college hopes.
A growing number of states, however, are making sure that all of their high-school students have easy access to the tests.
Carey M. Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, believes a test score can open doors. “Students may not even realize they have the potential to really go into college,” she said. “But children need to know that they have that potential.”
This past school year was the second time that all of Mississippi’s juniors took the ACT, during the school day and without paying a fee.
In the 2014-15 school year, Mississippi joined about two dozen other states that allow all juniors to take college-entrance exams without charge. Eighteen states pay for the ACT, and nine pay for the SAT, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation nationwide.
Sarah Ballard, an English and AP-literature teacher at Murrah High School, in Jackson, Miss., said in an email that the change was reinvigorating Murrah’s college-going culture. “We have students taking the test who would have never taken it and are now considering junior college and other opportunities,” she said.
Mississippi’s Legislature appropriated $1.3 million to administer the test in March 2015 to 35,000 students.
The relatively low price tag of statewide testing is one of the reasons it has caught on among policy makers in the effort to raise college enrollment, particularly among underserved populations.
Ann Hendrick is director of Get2College, a program of the Education Services Foundation that prepares Mississippi’s underserved students to attend and succeed in college. She sees the testing as a positive change. “Students don’t know what the ACT is; they don’t know why it’s important,” she said. “Taking it earlier gives them more exposure to the college admissions process.”
Researchers are working to untangle the question of whether underserved students are more likely to enroll in college as a result of a free entrance exam.
Students in states that require the test have lower average composite scores than states in which the test is optional — as might be expected. In 2015, Mississippi tied with North Carolina, another state in which all students at public high schools take the ACT, for the second-lowest average composite ACT score in the country: 19.0, compared with a national average of 21. The two states that have required the ACT the longest — since 2001 — are Illinois (which recently decided to switch to the SAT) and Colorado. They did better than Mississippi and North Carolina, with average composite scores of 20.7.
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One study of college enrollment in three states with mandatory ACT or SAT testing suggested that the policy re-sorted students among different types of institutions.
Daniel Klasik, an assistant professor of higher-education administration at George Washington University, found increases in enrollment in four-year colleges in Illinois and in the number of students enrolling at private and “more selective” four-year colleges in Colorado, as well as decreases in enrollment in public two-year institutions in Illinois and in Maine, which started requiring the SAT in 2006.
Mr. Klasik did not, however, find significant changes in overall postsecondary enrollment across those three states that could be linked to a test. The results of his study were published in 2013 in the journal Educational Researcher.
“The evidence has been relatively consistent that these policies do help increase four-year-college enrollment, suggesting that they are removing some sort of barrier to enrollment,” he said.
In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Education Finance and Policy, Joshua Hyman, an assistant professor of public policy, economics, and education at the University of Connecticut, used educational and demographic data on students in Michigan to analyze the effect of the policy in that state.
He estimated that it accounted for a 2-percent increase in the probability that a student would enroll in a four-year-college, with the largest jumps among poorer and male students.
“It’s hard to find policies that move the needle on college access, and this is one that several studies have shown that it boosts college enrollment — and it’s cheap,” said Mr. Hyman, noting that statewide testing is significantly less expensive than other efforts aimed at improving college enrollment, like state scholarships.
But even with the tests, many capable young people miss out. Mr. Hyman found that requiring all public-high-school students to take the exam increased the number of low-income students scoring as college-ready by nearly 50 percent, but that it raised the number of such students enrolling at four-year institutions by only 6 percent.
Amanda Wahlstedt has firsthand knowledge of the barriers that keep students from low-income families from going to college. Born and raised in Barbourville, Ky., she will attend Wellesley College this fall, having graduated from Knox Central High School, in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. That state has offered an in-school ACT since 2008.
A lack of information about college combined with a work-first culture, she said, meant that for many of her peers simply taking an entrance exam wasn’t enough to set them on the path to college: “I feel like every student needs a teacher or an adult that is able to tell them ‘Look, you are capable of this and you can do this.’ Because so many students don’t get that at home. Or they get ‘You’re expected to work,’ and that’s it.”
Ms. Wahlstedt interviewed fellow students, educators, and administrators as part of the Student Voice Team of an advocacy group that works to improve Kentucky schools. The team’s report, “Uncovering the Tripwires to Postsecondary Success,” describes how difficult it is for students from poor families to afford the “veiled costs” of getting into college, like test preparation, extracurricular activities, and advising.
She was offered free help from a private college-admissions counselor after she outlined some of those difficulties in an opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The counselor helped alert her to the QuestBridge Scholars program for students with financial hardships, which helped make attending Wellesley possible.
She took the ACT four times, she said, to improve her score. Most of her test preparation was self-driven. “I went online and took the practice test. I knew I struggled with math and science, so that was what I focused on the most, and I would try to read every day. As far as my school goes, most students only take the test one time, unless they didn’t pass it.”
Even after they secure good test scores, students must figure out how to get into the “college pipeline” and pay for their education.
In Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, those hurdles loom particularly large.
Ms. Hendrick, of Get2College, said that no single change, like statewide college-entrance tests, can unilaterally improve college enrollment among underserved students. Rather, a constellation of efforts ultimately gets a student into college.
“It will be a process of building that college-going culture in the high schools,” she said, “and certainly this one step by itself isn’t going to do it. But it’s a big piece.”
Peter Olsen-Phillips is a data reporter at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @POlsenPhillips, or email him at peter.olsen-phillips@chronicle.com.
